Losing irreplaceable images might just be every photographer’s worst nightmare. Fortunately, there are a few easy steps you can take to help prevent image loss. Almost all of these steps can be implemented right away with little to no cost or change to your overall workflow. While they might seem a little excessive, the resulting additional protection for your images should outweigh any inconvenience or minor cost. [Read more…]

As a photographer and a photography business owner, I go through a number of activities at the end of each year to close it out, just like many businesses do when performing year-end activities. These activities have become an essential part of my photography workflow, allowing me to continue using a very consistent and reliable method to not only store and archive my images, but also to be ready for future data growth and potential hardware changes. If you have not yet considered year-end activities for your photography, I would recommend to give the below article a read and see if it would suit your workflow. Basically, I have developed a set of procedures that I run on either December 31st, or the first few days of each new year to ensure that my data stays consistent, secure and fully backed up. Most of these procedures highlighted below are related to my current post-processing software of choice, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, but if you run any other software, you should be able to run through similar steps to make sure that you are set for another year of successful shooting.

The Lightroom import dialog is one of the most essential components of the software, not just because that’s how one gets images into Lightroom, but also because with the proper use of the import dialog, it is possible to properly organize images and apply specific presets that can potentially save quite a bit of time when post-processing images. In this article, I will go over the import dialog and cover its settings to hopefully help our readers in understanding its use and advantages.

We are very excited to announce the release of our second video course, Level 1: Workflow and Post-Processing. After months of hard work and many sleepless nights, we were finally able to wrap the course up and make it available for purchase. After receiving a lot of positive feedback on our first video, we decided to take it up a level and deliver something we are truly proud of. The result is a 14-hour educational course that will surely satisfy your hunger for photography knowledge for quite a while. In this course, we pick it up right where we left off last time; from the moment you insert your memory card into your computer, all the way to the image export process. We go over each step of the photography workflow process, provide detailed information on different post-processing tools available on the market today (along with the overview of the most popular ones), and give you in-depth coverage of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. In addition to the above, you will also learn how to properly organize your images and your Lightroom catalogs, find out about computer hardware required for post-processing, and even learn how to properly backup and export your images. To make it easy for you to follow the course, we are providing all relevant raw images, so that you can try all the tools we teach you to use. Without a doubt, this is one of the most detailed and complete courses you will find on both workflow and post-processing!

We are very excited to announce our second course, Level 1: Workflow and Post-Processing, which we have been working on for the past few months. We are currently in the process of adding some more bonus material and putting some finishing touches to the videos, which we are planning to release early next week. For now, I would like to present the trailer of the upcoming course, so that our readers could get a chance to see what we have in the course and what one can expect from it. This course completes our Level 1 basics courses, which means that from here on, we will be able to move up in content and complexity – we are already planning to start filming a Level 3 course on landscape photography later this summer, with the scheduled release of Q4 of 2016. It is truly exciting and rewarding to be working on these courses, because we are creating a strong foundation which we can build on in the future.

John Bosley and I have been working hard on producing our second video course – PL Level 1: Workflow and Post-Processing. While we still have quite a bit of work to do, we are planning to wrap things up by the end of the spring this year. Meanwhile, we thought it would be a good idea to share the below teaser, which shows some of the content that will go into the final production version of the course. We’ve had tremendous feedback on our PL Level 1: Photography Basics course from our readers, so we are really excited about producing the second video. We believe that this particular course will be of great value for many photographers, because it encompasses the entire workflow process, from setting up the camera, shooting and post-processing images, all the way to exporting images for the web or print.

Data loss is a very painful experience that unfortunately many of us go through at some point of our lives. In my workshops, lectures and this website, I spend quite a bit of time advocating the need for a well-established workflow that incorporates solid backup strategies to prevent data loss. And during this process, I came across many different backup routines practiced by other photographers, some of which I found to be downright scary. You have probably heard of horror stories of professional photographers losing their life’s work, or wedding photographers losing images of weddings that they were not able to deliver to their clients yet. It sure happens, and it usually happens at the worst possible time too! It is one thing when you lose your personal data / photos and totally another when you are dealing with a client who paid you money. I cannot imagine how one could even handle a situation with lost wedding photos, as it would be impossible to recreate those precious moments. Sadly, for many of us, it seems like data loss has to take place in order for us to seriously consider a solid backup strategy and workflow. But it does not have to! In this article, I will walk you through two scenarios for establishing a good photography backup workflow: a low-cost and painless workflow for hobbyists, and a much more serious workflow for enthusiasts and professionals. For the second scenario, I will reveal my own backup strategy.

This content sharing contest came at a fortuitous time; for a while, I had posted essays on books. I let that lapse because I decided to spend more time on photography. Like many others, I have opinions and have wanted to jump back into writing. Great thing for Photography Life to ask for guest posts!

Recently, I have come realize that Mike Johnston’s phrasing of photography as its own thing, is a profound statement of an approach and appreciation of the craft. He has a whole recent series on it at The Online Photographer. At the very least, it is something that appealed greatly to me.

Many photographers have been buying expensive wide gamut monitors in order to take a full advantage of their ability to display over a billion of colors. What many do not realize, is that their actual workflow is most likely limited to just 16.7 million colors due to software and hardware limitations. How does one achieve a true 10 bit per channel, or 30 bit workflow? What are the advantages and is it worth the effort? To answer these questions, I decided to dig into the 30 bit photography workflow in detail and explain its advantages, disadvantages and also discuss its future.

Most of my previous Mastering Lightroom series articles were about specific techniques and features of Adobe’s popular post-processing tool for photographers. Of course, learning these techniques is very important, yet for someone who’s just started using Lightroom, other questions come to mind first. Where do you start? What do you do first? How to keep your catalogs uncluttered and organized? Answers to these questions can be extensive, but in this article, I will try to describe a very simple, basic workflow I often use myself. This workflow allows me to keep my catalogs tidy yet at the same time helps me get to actual post-processing very quickly and in just a few steps. Many of you already have your favorite workflows, I’m sure, and some will involve different or more steps than this one. With this article, my goal is to get those of you completely new to Lightroom up and running quickly so that, with practice, you can decide on your own approach.